Perchance to dream
by crackinthecup
Summary: "Early company never slides into his routine. Yet here it is, in the hunched shape and night-sky eyes of Maeglin." Sleep is chased from Rog, as it always is. What is unusual is that the forge has already been appropriated, and smithing is not the only thing he and Maeglin have in common.


**A/N:** The title has been wrested out of Hamlet, Act III, Scene I, so all credit should go Shakespeare's way. Written as a birthday gift for russandolly on Tumblr. A tiny heads-up that this deals with the aftermath of Angband-induced trauma.

* * *

When Rog dreams, it is darkness and sensation: beads of sweat breathless over his arms; the whisper of a whip and its shrieking suddenness across his shoulders; the distant grind of laughter down a corridor. It is darkness and sensation and he claws into wakefulness with a gasp he is unable to mute.

Tonight, though—

Tonight he dreams of _light_ , a tessellated glow of silver and gold that he fancies he can inhale upon a breath of air. He fancies he can feel it pour from his fingertips as he pares a ruby into a mirror maze of facets, as Aulë offers his ethereal smile and a heartbeat later he doubts it was there at all.

Yet even with the placid hum that echoes of something forgotten in his bones, Rog still wakes up to a sky flat and gray as a steel blade. Dawn will seep in but slowly. He knows the pattern as though it were the minutes of a meeting repeated day after day.

So he upends the pitcher over the washbasin. He splashes water over his face to speed the passage of night to day, and does not truncate the spiral of habit even when he recollects that he has no reason to let _this_ dream trickle away. He dresses, as he always does: breeches first, tunic after; he does not own a set of robes. He forgoes the looking glass when he braids his hair, and his fingers skitter through the motions like spiders weaving their webs.

Here in the south-east of Gondolin the fountains are but a susurrus, part of the fabric of the world as much as the stir of the wind. His feet tread the path to the smithy, his skin glistens with the faint drizzle in the air, while his mind touches that flow of light over and over again. He thinks he would not want to gaze upon Glingal and Belthil just now.

It takes too long for the brightness in his mind to dim into the forlorn pinprick of one furnace. Early company never slides into his routine. Yet here it is, in the hunched shape and night-sky eyes of Maeglin. He is stooped over his workbench, and the flames behind him gutter as Rog closes the door.

"Up early, lad?" Rog wants to boom, yet his voice dwindles to a loud whisper. When he was still young enough to trace an imaginary river over his mother's drooping, shimmering trousers, she took him to the Halls of Mandos. Nothing to worry about, she said; his father would be fine. He had been commissioned to design a coop for the songbirds in the gardens of _Lórien_ , a dome mounted upon a wooden pole inlaid with gold-leaf curlicues; and while hauling himself up a ladder to inspect progress, a misstep, a snapping rung, and his skull had cracked upon the ground.

It took mere minutes to retrieve his father, hale and with the story on his lips as a novelty. Time has effaced that memory into a twisting pang, a jab of thought that death was once deemed a rarity. Nay, as he looks upon Maeglin now, Rog thinks of the silent, cowl-shadowed lips that quirked a welcome upon their arrival. A creature that looked no different from them, and yet Rog's eyes were affixed upon the ghost of its gait, the profoundly _other_ energy humming about it; an energy that hushed voice and shook _fëa_. It glided and its hands plucked gestures out of the air. _There he is_ , it seemed to say without words. _You know the way out_.

Rog wonders now whether the creature knew the way out too.

"I couldn't sleep," Maeglin answers in a soft voice, and though his face is blank, Rog can see the darkness plowed beneath his eyes. In painstaking detail he has probed at it in the mirror—it is jarring to notice it plastered upon someone else. And when Rog feels a thrill at his spine, he does not want to know what it means.

"It is nothing worth fretting over. One missed night of rest means slumber like that of an extinguished furnace upon the morrow." Rog knows it is not true. Not for him and not for Maeglin. It means footfalls measuring the length of the bedchamber, the desperate tweak of the curtain and the hope that morning would not tarry crumbling ashen on the tongue.

At last his gentle, lapping light leaches from him and in its wake remains but the memory of the frail pulse from within the iron crown. Rog has seen it. He could sense the Silmarils failing with every smile split over Morgoth's lips, every echo of his words scratching against the inside of his skull, as he stood before the throne shackled hand and foot and roped about the waist to a dozen other elves, a dozen other _slaves_. None were yet branded, but the power flurrying through stone and steel and skin left not a sliver of doubt.

Harrowing was the time until Rog could lie to himself that he no longer felt it, that it no longer gnawed through sinew and rooted through bone to sap and dominate. He detects it within Maeglin now, ancient and venomous, and the sick roil in his stomach cannot assure him that he is mistaken.

"You are right," Maeglin forces himself to say, still soft, still barely loud enough to carry over the death of the fire. "It is but a passing malaise." The syllables are like bones in his mouth.

Rog parts his lips to say something. _I know, I know_ —he ought to bridge the gap between them and pat sympathy into Maeglin's shoulder. But his vocal cords are paralyzed, and something within his core howls for retreat.

Too plainly is it displayed, for any who know what to look for. And Rog does; he has no need to ask what they did to him. (The realization that he should have asked _why_ and _how_ will crash down as a guillotine—no physical signs of torment mar Maeglin's pallor, he returned from his expedition among the northern gullies of the Echoriath well-fed, with a threadbare story unspooling too smoothly from his tongue. Deaths and a cave-in, and no one thought to question it. Neither does Rog.) He has vowed to provide support. Many a time he has listened, and even more often he has hefted a hammer and fitted it to a slack palm. _You're one of us, now. You have a home here._

Maeglin does not want the support he knows how to give. Maeglin reminds him too much of himself. Still—

"You're always welcome in the forge, at any time of day or night," Rog ekes out and the stilted sweep of his hand through the air screams that he could not say more. Maeglin nods, gutting the tiny quaver of an inhalation, as the silence tries to pretend that he has not. A breath later the embers pulse into red fury, and in the spill of light Maeglin's pale skin is peeled away into raw tissue. Rog stares, eardrums clamoring with long-deadened screams.

"I will leave you to your work," Maeglin murmurs, slipping away from the crimson glare, and he is a being of shadow once more. Rog is unsure whether he imagines the slight tremble in his voice.

"Feel free to stay, lad. I wouldn't mind some company." Rog trudges to his own workbench, he palms the weight of his hammer—to shatter the moment. Maeglin hesitates. Rog musters interest in the scimitar glinting upon the table, in the glister of its crystal-knobbed hilt. Egalmoth has dented it yet again.

An exhalation, an etiolated sigh. Maeglin pieces himself into his chair.

Rog decides that the incident need not be brought up again.


End file.
